Pages

Friday, April 20, 2012

Kel-Tec KSG - a Reader's Experience

Reader, Jersey, recently commented on the Kel-Tec KSG post from a while back about Caleb's video of the KSG choking down during slide manipulation. He had this to say:

I can tell you this much about the gun, dont buy it. I waited months for mine and recently took delivery of it and as any excited boy with a new toy would do,I cleaned it and I went straight to the range. First Impression,it looks cool and that’s where the good impressions end. Kel Tec should have waited till the design was complete and bug free before releasing any of these weapons to anyone.:incazzato:

The gun is very awkward almost to the point of difficult to load and you will most likely cut your finger doing so. Now imagine trying to load this thing in the field under high stress situations. I dont see how it is possible to combat load a round into the chamber without turning the gun upside down. The magazine selector switch is very hard to manipulate from right to left on my gun and would need to be in the neutral position to attempt a combat load, which is one more extra step which would most likely get you shot in the face in real combat..
Chambered and fired first round, and racked it back only to encounter a double feed jam! The gun failed to extract the spent shell and attempted to load not 1 but 2 additional rounds at once, so a total of 3 rounds were stuck in there, leaving me with a 26″ long baseball bat to defend myself with. This type of jam is simply impossible to clear in a combat situation and would have cost me my life. It takes several minutes to clear the jams once they happen. I fired another round and it did the same exact thing. In fact the first 6-7 attempts the gun jammed the same way. Thinking it was me possibly limp wristing the slide, I allowed 4 other colleges to attempt to shoot it and it did the same thing for all 4 of them, including one range master/fire arms instructor. So it was not me. Now I am far from a gun expert, but I have been in law enforcement for over 15 years and qualify 2 times a year with our shotgun and have put thousands of shotgun rounds down range and never once had a shotgun jam on me.

I notified Kel-tec who told me they wanted me to return the gun which keep in mind was just purchased a day or two prior, and would send me a call tag and take a look at it when they get a chance. That was over 4-5 days ago, no call tag, no returned email or phone call.

I fired the gun several more times since and the gun now religiously jams on me at least once out of every 10-15 rounds.

To make things worse I attempted one more time today to shoot it utilizing a forward pistol grip which subsequently broke 2 teeth of the rail within the first 3 shots….

Kel-tec stated this gun would revolutionize the industry, and if by revolutionize they mean get a ton of people killed, then yes they are doing it. At this point I fell that Kel Tec is utilizing people like me to do their R&D for them while making big money on markups.

The design is really stupid when you look at it in detail and how the rounds are extracted and rechambered via one exit which increases the jamming probability much more than a side eject. The extracted round has to pass downward past the rounds in the magazine, then a new round needs to be fed upward. In my opinion this X-crossing effect is a poor design prone to failure and jamming. There is no way this gun would ever stand up to the abuse of actual combat performance either for police or military.

Save your money and buy a real shotgun this thing is a video game cool looking novelty, and I dont predict Kel Tec being around the marketplace much longer with failures like this weapon.

He went on to add...

Update.
Some funny news, not only has Keltec still not responded to my issues, I was banned for posting my review on the Keltec Owners Group Forums...LOL the owners of Keltec firearms cant handle negative comments about their firearms..

This nightmare keeps getting worse and worse emails to Ryan at keltec, 3 messages left with him and the main number, no call back no call tag. I got one reply from him stating he was looking into why I haven't received a call tag and how this is not Keltec standard. I cant imagine if i do get the call tag I will get the gun back anytime soon....My only recourse thus far has been to do a dispute on my credit card since I purchased the gun directly from Keltec.

Wow! I am really sorry that you are having to go through that. I have had my reservations about the gun, and from what I have seen with other people's experiences it has been a "pass" for me. I hope it all works out for you... keep us posted.